Zen and the art of payroll

One of Silicon Valley's most high-flying IPOs of 2012 belonged to Workday, which puts HR software in the cloud. So it only stands to reason that other companies would be lining up to bring similar boring-but-important business tasks into the modern era.

Companies such as San Francisco's ZenPayroll, which came out of stealth mode Tuesday morning. The Y Combinator seedling promises to deliver what it calls "modern, delightful payroll." For most of us, the delightful part of payroll is the check that shows up every two weeks, but ZenPayroll CEO Joshua Reeves says that from an employer's perspective, legacy payroll software is overly complicated and expensive.

Reeves, in a press release, said his product is both secure and easy to use, requiring no lengthy installation or training. He also claims it saves employers time and money by automating tax calculations and filing government documents online. All of which sounds, well, boring but also important; ZenPayroll says the IRS last year socked employers with more than $5 billion in payroll tax penalties, which the company blames in part on kludgy software.

Reeves certainly doesn't seem to have had any trouble selling his vision to a slate of high-profile angel investors, who have chipped in on a $6.1 million seed round. They include Box CEO Aaron Levie, Yammer chief David Sacks, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo. "I come across tons of enterprise software companies, and ZenPayroll has one of the strongest team pedigrees," Levie told me. Reeves sold his last startup -- Palo Alto-based unwrap, which helped users create business apps for Facebook -- in 2010 for an undisclosed sum.

Advertisement

Levie noted that the market for payroll software is "in the tens of billions. They can do for payroll what Salesforce did for CRM (customer relationship management) -- making it available to businesses everywhere, at a lower cost, and with a dramatically better user experience."

I was also intrigued to notice that ZenPayroll's bevy of investors includes Drew Houston, CEO of Levie's archrival, Dropbox. So if these two guys can agree on something, maybe it really is important ... even if it's boring.

-- Peter Delevett

will intel make chips for apple?

Considerable speculation has been spewing from blogs and Wall Street analysts lately that Intel might make chips for Apple's iPhone, which seemingly would be a big plus for the Santa Clara semiconductor giant.

Intel is trying to make headway in the smartphone market, and the task would be much easier with a customer as dominant in the mobile-device market as Apple.

When asked about the idea at an analyst conference earlier this month, Intel's retiring CEO Paul Otellini was tantalizingly vague, noting, "there's nothing to say we can't."

But in a note to his clients, Raymond James analyst Hans Mosesmann scoffed at the idea as "amusing.'" Among other concerns, he doubted it would make sense financially for Intel and feared it might merely send the industry a signal that Intel's traditional chip business "isn't working."

-- Steve Johnson

Go Daddy lands ex-Yahoo

executive Blake Irving

Former Yahoo chief product officer Blake Irving has landed a new job as CEO at Go Daddy, the Arizona-based Web-hosting service that's known for making it easy to set up your own website, and for some controversial TV ads featuring scantily clad models.

In a quick phone interview Tuesday, Irving joked that the new job is a natural fit because he's been a Go Daddy customer for years, as the proprietor of some 45 Web domains that are hosted on the company's servers. Irving, who led the development of Yahoo's product strategy and a division that built a new publishing platform among other things, explained that he's always been the go-to guy for friends and relatives who needed help setting a website for their startup or nonprofit ventures.

More seriously, Irving said he sees a big opportunity to expand Go Daddy's business beyond Web hosting, by helping startups and small companies with things like social media campaigns and mobile apps.

In places like Brazil and India, he said, "very few people are getting on the Web using PCs. It's all happening on mobile devices. Those mobile devices are the portal to the Internet today."

Irving spent 15 years as a senior executive at Microsoft before he was hired at Yahoo by then-CEO Carol Bartz. He left the Sunnyvale Internet company last year when Bartz's successor, Scott Thompson, reorganized and disbanded much of the division Irving led.

-- Brandon Bailey

New funding for

One Kings Lane, 23andMe

A cluster of Silicon Valley startups were shouting "Show me the money" Tuesday, and the biggest hauls were being raked in by companies whose founders have famous spouses.

Upscale home-decor e-tailer One Kings Lane landed a $50 million Series D venture round led by late-stage firm Institutional Venture Partners. Previous backers Kleiner Perkins, Greylock Partners and Tiger Global Management were also in on the deal. OKL, as it's known among devotees, was co-founded in 2009 by Alison Pincus, whose husband, Mark, is CEO of Zynga.

Fifty million also is the magic number for Mountain View's 23andMe, which announced its own D round Tuesday. The personal genetics company, which sells swab-and-mail home DNA kits and has compiled a massive database of user genotypes, landed the loot courtesy of new investor Yuri Milner, along with past backers New Enterprise Associates, Google Ventures and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Brin, of course, is married to 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, who unlike Ali Pincus has held firm to the CEO's reins at her company. 23andMe's press release also points out that Wojcicki invested in the round herself, independent of Brin's contribution.